Kindle Notes & Highlights
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January 12 - July 4, 2018
be very inclusive, transparent and available from the start.
the best advice I ever read on social was “Be yourself and don’t do anything stupid.”
the challenge for agencies will be to limit our desire to make brands even more mobile. Is this really relevant? Is this really useful? Is this really, truly adding value?
Something to touch, smell and put on a desk.
Since the pesky internet came along it has been increasingly hard for agencies to make money servicing clients the traditional way.
Where once the agencies were in charge, now they have to work harder for less money.
We want the thrill of the start up with the safety of agency life.
In the advertising business we are addicted to the new, the bright, the shiny. And like all addicts we don’t think clearly. So, we overestimate the amazingness of something.
The notion that ‘Thursdays at 2-4’ is innovation time is helpful for agency management but never works. Weird stuff happens when you least expect it. And you have to have a hierarchy that accepts that and is willing to act accordingly.
there is a huge difference - a canyon - between a prototype and a successful product.
the team got excited and then disheartened because it was a token gesture. No one really checked to see if there were products like this. No one was ever really prepared to spend the money required to make this product. No one ever really believed this was a product the agency would make. Programs like these do more harm than good. They promise everything and deliver nothing. There is no skin in the game.
Clayton Christensen, the father of disruptive innovation, says, “you can’t start a disruptive business from inside an incumbent one.” The incumbent business will always take the resources from the disruptive one.
“Because we’ve released so many products over the years, we’ve become a bit scattered, a bit diluted. Nobody does their best work when they’re spread too thin. We certainly don’t. We do our best work when we’re all focused on one thing.”
“Like any good start up it has evolved” said Renny. From a fairly low key and fluid start, PIE is now more of a program and has built in relationships with Wieden clients such as Coke, Target and Google. The start ups receive mentorship from these clients.
He felt that most of his agency contact was with ‘low level flunkies’ tasked with finding hot stuff to make the agency look good, ‘no one had any real power to do a deal’. Steve explained, ‘Even if this was to educate clients you’re going to be one page in a 100 page deck. So fuck that.’ Fair enough.
La razón por la que Notable. no trabaja con agencias de investigación grandes.
The smartest agencies will engage in good times and bad, consistently and reasonably.”
Nike + worked because two of the most innovative and cash rich companies in the world wanted to make that happen.
if an agency has a hankering to make the next Instagram, then everything needs to be set in place. A budget. A serious budget. A stand alone team, that probably includes weirdos from outside of adland. No client work, not ever. Even that make or break pitch. And an agency management that stays 100% behind the team no matter how badly they fuck up.
Mary Meeker, the queen of Internet trends, decided that sharing economy was one of the trends for 2012.
The specific behaviour that steadily fuels the collaborative economy is a combination of value-seeking, convenience, instant gratification, quality control, and looking for less mass, more unique, experiences.
making something better, easier and more fun for consumers, or the fact that our branding playbooks suck because they haven’t been updated for the past 75 years, ever since the industrialisation happened?
The real innovation of the collaborative economy is not that people are - brace yourself - sharing, bartering, swapping, renting, lending and collaborating, because they have been doing that since the dawn of time. The real innovation is that the collaborative economy created a market for superior customer experience.
This waste is a direct result of the 75 years of branding being done in a certain way. This mode of branding persuaded, inspired and nudged us into acquiring more, more, and then some more.
The much more pressing question for us is how we can help prevent our clients from falling in the trap of the Innovator’s Dilemma (when new technologies cause firms to fail), help them see that the collaborative economy is not just a “movement,” and make them competitive in this complex landscape.
Brands are going to be more valuable to consumers if they create some sort of new value that did not exist before.
Intimate knowledge of its customers allowed Nordstorm to come up with the initiative that responds to their needs in the best possible way.
All these new branding directions are aimed at one, single-minded goal: amplifying customer experience. Make it better. Make it more complete, A-to-Z. Close the value loop. Provide consistent quality. Put customer convenience first. Be useful. Be interesting and stay clear of one-size-fits-all experiences. Allow people to share (people love sharing!). Add value in every customer interaction. Focus on unmet needs, and be one step ahead.
Brands must stop hijacking humanity by butting-in on public conversations they don’t have a right to be in.
In 2014, we need more from brands. If brands land on our radar at all, it’s because they’ve found a way to make our lives easier or better.
marketing can be personalised – “Jon, we haven’t seen you in a while…” but is it personal? Does it make intelligent attempts to connect with who I am?
Making in today’s world is a much more useful form of thinking. When you keep doing things you’ve never done before, you become better at doing anything for the first time. By learning from failure, and honing our intuition, we can begin to thrive on uncertainty.
Squint at a product, look obliquely at a service. What is it really doing? What else could do that? How would you build a subscription model, a freemium version, a paper prototype, a hand-cranked experience?
To understand what these are, you have to build up a picture of diversity by talking to as many people as you can.
rather than boil research down into ‘one key insight’, find the things that make people different, highlight them and celebrate them.
Placebo Innovation. What a great summation of making us feel better by tinkering around and actually not doing anything
It’s not that long ago that designers made advertising and advertising creatives designed. It’s curious that in a time of supposed convergence, disciplines drift further apart. A sea of specialists and no generalist in sight. Could we describe someone as a generalist and not mean it as an insult?
remember that your branded app will only become a favourite if it doesn’t force fingers into all kind of hooks and pretzels.
we will only be successful working hand-in-hand with our clients. We agencies are able to react to this change in media use. But only when our clients understand the value and extra effort required.
Give it a shape that the audience can tap, touch, nudge and manipulate. Or speak to. Or gesture at.
‘touch’ will become the preferred interface for almost any real life situation involving computers and screens. So how can we create more brand videos that customers want to literally get their hands on? Or projections, apps and kiosk screens that entice punters to tap, touch and caress them?
Ask yourself whether your work would survive in this situation. Watch real people use a prototype of your idea. Keep on testing and interrogating, then improve and redeploy.
far too often music activity happens simply because it appeals to a younger demographic and is seen as a source of cool for the brand.
With a clear understanding of what you want your brand to stand for and clarity on the marketing objective (including target audience) that the activity is designed to address, it is possible to build music solutions that are both distinctive and effective.
actual jetpacks aren’t coming (sorry to get your hopes up) but the type of future we once imagined coming alongside jetpacks and flying cars is on the way. It’s a future that’s defined by an ecosystem of things that seamlessly work together and make life a whole lot better.
these disparate technologies are becoming a whole lot less disparate. They’re starting to connect with each other and pretty soon, you’ll be thinking more about what you want to do than who has the technology to make that happen. Think about this…
platform we’re using, we’ll just communicate. We’ll say what we want to communicate and to whom – that person will then choose how they’ll receive that information.
The most fascinating part of our future isn’t that it’s lined by unheard of technology, it’s that the foundation for this convergence of things into a seamless ecosystem already exists.
you need to start thinking about how you can create for, mine and fund those ecosystems.
It’ll be the answer to the question – how does the promise of the brand stay with you wherever you go?
Today, we bill for our work, but as we continue to monetise data, the model will shift from paying for work to paying for action.
